NUSRA LATIF QURESHI; NAAEM RANA
Indian miniatures are an intimate genre, of sumptuous detail, sweet enclosures, intricate patterns, archaic costumes and explicit copulation. There is something joyful in their apparently naive schemata and quaint perspectives. And, perhaps because of this, South-Asian miniatures were admired by Western art lovers for a certain nostalgic charm. From a colonial point of view, they represented an archetypical garden of innocence in a somewhat backward idiom.
Since the 19th century, the intimate miniature seemed to symbolise an enchanting cultural stasis, resisting progress in the face of the great mimetic authority of Western painting. The strong illusionism of European oil painting seems to go with the material pre-eminence of the colonising culture.
Nusra Latif Qureshi ingeniously unpicks the colonial marginalisation of the Indian miniature. Her Exotic bodies skilfully investigates imagery from both Indian and European traditions, but favouring the indigenous motifs and techniques ("musaviri") from Pakistan.
Most of her paintings do not look exactly like old miniatures. Though demonstrating mastery of the ancient skills, they're clearly contemporary art, with compositions that ambitiously juxtapose several elements: perspectival space against flat colour, volumetrically rendered figures against silhouettes or outlines, source material from old paintings and from photographs.
The paintings scintillate with the delicate use of luminous colour. Figures are placed in inventive relationships with backgrounds, sometimes transcending borders or chromatic zones, but always answered in some way by the weight of colour or space somewhere else in the composition.
The content is subversive. An example is Gardens of desire in which a naked woman with finely drawn features is embraced by a male figure, shown only as an orange silhouette. He wants to make love because he is already between her legs and thumbing her nipple; and I guess we don't need more detail. Such delicate groping belongs to Pahari painting; but it's always somehow normalised by intimacy. By effacing the male's identity, Qureshi withdraws the requisite intimacy. It no longer seems natural but potentially monstrous.
Intimacy always makes you feel that boy and girl are a match for one another. Sex, the great leveller, relieves you of issues such as inequality. But Qureshi's treatment of the couple as a carnal entity on one side and an abstract male institution on the other demonstrates that the lascivious cuddle - however exciting - does not in any way render these people as equal. To underline the point, a triumvirate of bearded patriarchs sits down for drinks at the bottom of the painting.
Other works explore colonial majesty but in an equally uncanny way, with images of the big white hunter or viceroy who believed they presided over the certain moral and economic improvement of the colonised.
Naaem Rana updates this post-colonial consciousness in Heavenly products. The colonists are now commercial and their artillery is advertising. The game is the naive buyer of mass-produced packaged goods and the booty is profit in another foreign market.
From colonisation, represented by painstaking painting, we move to globalisation, represented by digital manipulation. The scenes are equally sparkling but the patterns are no longer the product of ornamental fantasy. They are the gridded replication of products, reiterated visually by mechanical reproduction.
Upon this somewhat heartless field of branded goods and entertainment images in tight arrays are floated florid forms of Urdu script. Language is the smallest obstacle for commercial interests in penetrating nations. It is notable, however, that both the products and the script look the worse for wear by their combination. They both lose authenticity through the contact.
As the groovy insignia of American capital clashes with the sacred traditions of Asia, a gaudy melancholy prevails. Sure, it's now an old story - which Rana reveals through historical media figures - the collision is ever more relevant today, as the commercial aggression of Western nations attempts to take over each part of the imagined world and is resented to unprecedented levels.
Superintending this insensitive proliferation of Western values is the triumphant figure of George Bush, brandishing a Coke bottle.
These artists remind us that art can have moral and intellectual potency; but they also remind us that it's first necessary to have something relevant to say.
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